My good friend Lucien Engelen (@zorg20) tells the story of how he used Twitter to find someone able to develop an iPhone application for him in an extremely short time. He says it would have taken him weeks to do an RFP or ask one of his analysts to identify options, and by using Twitter he had the whole project completed (and the app in the iTunes store) within just a couple of weeks or so.
I’m taking a lesson from him, but in a different application, and doing my first TFP, or “Tweet for Proposals.”
Here’s the background:
Our Mayo Clinic blogs, including our Health Policy Blog, News Blog, Podcast Blog and Sharing Mayo Clinic, among others, have been hosted on WordPress.com until this point.
We started with WordPress.com because it was easy, fast, reliable and didn’t require us to dedicate IT resources and servers, and because it would eventually enable us to move to a self-hosted solution without losing Google juice. The URLs would all remain the same, but would be pointed to a different server.
I believe the time for our migration has come, and I would like to move our blogs from WordPress.com to a WordPress MU installation to create an easier growth path and also to give us more flexibility in plug-ins, widget embedding, etc.
Here’s what I think we need:
- Help setting up the WordPress MU platform.
- Help in migration from our existing WordPress.com blogs to the new platform, including mapping each of the URLs to the MU platform.
- Hosting and support that is rock solid and available 24/7. WordPress.com has been excellent in meeting traffic surges and has enabled us to focus on content instead of technical issues.
In essence, I think our ideal provider would have experience in migrating blogs from WordPress.com to the WordPress MU platform, and would currently be hosting several blogs on a WordPress MU installation. We’re not looking for a provider to do anything with content or comment moderation, but solely hosting and technical assistance, managing plug-ins, and otherwise enabling us to gain extended functionality as well as flexibility and scalability.
We could consider hosting on our own servers, and if you would want to propose that kind of model, we would be open to discussing. I would like to see, though, if we could get the 24/7 support from someone who is in the server business instead of expecting it from our IT staff.
I would appreciate it if you would pass this TFP on to anyone you think would be qualified, and I welcome any recommendations you have for suitable providers. Please leave them in the comments below. If you want more information or to discuss this off-line, send me a note here: aase (dot) lee (at) mayo (dot) edu.